Being Muslim After 9/11: Journalists No Longer Dare to Broadcast This Story
Mobeen Azhar Is Not Afraid to Tackle Hard Subjects in a Brilliant Documentary on the Rise of Islamophobia, Even When It Means Hearing Criticism of His Own Decisions. In 2024, journalist Mobeen Azhar made the documentary Small Town, Big Uprising, which should have been highly influential but had an impact in our modern media landscape. He explained how anti-immigrant racists were radicalized by online propaganda, lies and hearsay.
In the year 2024, journalist Mobin Ezhar made a big splash with a documentary called Shehr Koch, which should have been very influential, but was not in our modern media climate. He described how anti-immigrant racists, radicalized by online propaganda, lies and hearsay, end up in the streets in shocking violence and rioting against a largely imaginary enemy.
Azhar's new film deals with a broader and thornier problem and is therefore less satisfying. But in his willingness to discuss tough issues — even if it means hearing difficult arguments, some of which take aim at him personally — he still provokes thoughts and airs views that better-known journalists would never approach.
25 years ago there was a time when being British and Muslim was... cool, you know? he says We were on the cover of magazines and were elected to parliament. We even captained the English cricket team. And then it happened. Cut to footage of the explosion of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The world hasn't been like this since - and life for British Muslims certainly hasn't been.
In this film, Azz charts the rise of Islamophobia every quarter of a century, his concern is how Muslims – and Muslim filmmakers like him – have reacted. To do this, he teams up with an older documentarian, Masood Khan, who is the show's director and is often seen stuck in Azhar's passenger seat with a hand-held camera, to capture the obligatory shots of "the driving wife." As the film progresses, he becomes one of Azhar's most important collaborators, but as Azhar makes his first visit, he sticks to his original work, Salma Yaqoob's house in Birmingham.
Yaqub's career in politics began when he was spat on in the street immediately after 9/11, when before he was just "Selma, a mother at the school gate." In 2003, he helped organize the largest political demonstration in British history against the upcoming invasion of Iraq. "It was an amazing day," he recalls. "Such a sea of humanity. And yes, there was hope." Azhar comments that his tired face shows that hope is now lost. "The fire is still the same," says Jacob.
While the consequence for Muslims in Iraq was that many were killed, the less serious consequences here were still deeply troubling. Azhar describes how radical Islamist agitators took advantage when their warnings about ignoring protests were proven correct. They began to preach loudly against integration and support violent resistance. At that time, Azhar and Khan made a film about this phenomenon. Now, to their great credit, they are willing to listen to people who think it was a treacherous mistake.
Alias Kermani in Bradford and Frost Latif in Luton are community leaders who have worked to eliminate local Muslim men. Kermani is militant and Latif is soft-spoken, but both accuse Azhar of fueling Islamophobia by helping to fuel Islamophobia. A non-representative margin Latif says: "The problem is the disproportionate propaganda of these people." They were given a platform in the mainstream media because they bought into the post-9/11 and 7/7 narrative that there is this great Islamic threat.
These meetings lead Azhar and Khan to discuss their filmmaking careers. On the one hand, a journalist holds up a mirror to society and cannot be expected to ignore inconvenient facts. Journalism, on the other hand, is a series of choices about what to cover and what to ignore, and choosing where to put limited resources can have profound effects.
Azhar goes to Lowestoft to meet Evan, a reformed former organizer of the English far-right Defense League. He says the EDL used Stacey Dooley's 2007 film 'Secret Mosque' and the 2012 BBC documentary 'My City Fanatics' as recruitment videos, and he was radicalized by the media presence of much-quoted extremist preacher Anjem Chaudhary, now serving a life sentence for running a banned terrorist organisation.
Azhar and Khan's fascinating discussion about it, in the final scenes of the film, is filled with sad weariness. Azhar admits to feeling jaded by the events of 2017, when terrorist attacks on Westminster Bridge, London Bridge and Manchester Arena sparked a retaliatory attack on a mosque in north London. In 2026, when Stephen Yaxley Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, incites Islam on the streets of London, Khan doesn't go to cover it, much to Azhar's furious dismay. He is enough
Azhar continues to report on the ground, trying to make sense of the chaos outside of the Yaxley-Lennon appearance in the cursed Oxford Union debate. It is easy to see that something has gone wrong. Determining what could or should have been done to stop it is not. Meanwhile, life as a British Muslim is getting harder.